Note body - clearing empty text lines

[rares-urdea]

Hello!
We've noticed that in the Note body there are often empty text objects.
When we make changes to note in terms of adding or removing commands, I've noticed that an empty text object is left behind whenever a change is made to commands. (sort of like a placeholder)

Is it possible to clear out these objects so that the Note body is more concise and easy to read?
At the moment, if there are dozens of empty text objects and 2 commands scattered somewhere within the body, it makes the user experience a bit frustrating as you have to manually remove all the new lines in the body to get it to be easy to read.

In the database it will look like this:

[{"type": "text", "value": ""}, {"data": {"id": 1095, "command_uuid": "691123c4-6c7d-415b-880b-2beefab9f64a"}, "type": "command", "value": "reasonForVisit"}, {"type": "text", "value": ""}, {"type": "text", "value": ""}, {"type": "text", "value": ""}, {"type": "text", "value": ""}, {"type": "text", "value": ""}, {"type": "text", "value": ""}, {"data": {"id": 232, "command_uuid": "a80c2807-6132-434a-acb8-d469572c2a6d"}, "type": "command", "value": "diagnose"}, {"type": "text", "value": ""}, {"type": "text", "value": ""}, {"type": "text", "value": ""}, {"type": "text", "value": ""}, {"type": "text", "value": ""}, {"type": "text", "value": ""}, {"type": "text", "value": ""}, {"type": "text", "value": ""}, {"type": "text", "value": ""}, {"type": "text", "value": ""}, {"type": "text", "value": ""}, {"type": "text", "value": ""}, {"type": "text", "value": ""}, {"type": "text", "value": ""}, {"type": "text", "value": ""}, {"type": "text", "value": ""}, {"type": "text", "value": ""}, {"type": "text", "value": ""}, {"type": "text", "value": ""}, {"type": "text", "value": ""}, {"type": "text", "value": ""}, {"type": "text", "value": ""}, {"type": "text", "value": ""}, {"type": "text", "value": ""}, {"type": "text", "value": ""}, {"type": "text", "value": ""}]

with that being translated into the UI as:

whereas ideally we would want it to look like this:

[{"data":{"id":1095,"command_uuid":"691123c4-6c7d-415b-880b-2beefab9f64a"},"type":"command","value":"reasonForVisit"},{"data":{"id":232,"command_uuid":"a80c2807-6132-434a-acb8-d469572c2a6d"},"type":"command","value":"diagnose"}]

with the UI interpreting it something along the lines of:

My ideal version of this would be to not allow more than X empty text objects at the beginning and end of a note body, as well as in between commands so that we don't need to add additional handling via SDK. But if that's not reasonable / doable, I'd be happy to write a plugin to deal with this just as well.

[marythought]

Hi @rares-urdea ,

Thanks for bringing this to our attention.

Some clarifying questions:

• are the note commands being added/removed mostly through automated plugin activity, or by a user?
• is your primary concern the data state or the UI experience of someone reading the note? (I'm reading into this that it's the latter, but correct me if that's wrong.)

I know the "type: text" data objects are there to support unstructured text, which we don't recommend but do allow. And it certainly seems like each {"type": "text", "value": ""} represents a blank line.

I could see us adding the equivalent of a strip() note body effect to remove 1) leading and closing blank line objects, and/or 2) all blank line objects. This would probably only be valuable for automated command activity though. I'll check with the team on feasibility if that sounds like something that would be helpful!

[rares-urdea]

Hi @marythought !

• the note commands are added / removed through automated plugin activity, however, we do not add those empty data objects ourselves. It seems they are managed automatically somehow.
• definitely the UI experience. The data state doesn't really bother us.

[marythought]

You got it. Feature request created! #1257